Ottawa Citizen
December 17, 2011
www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Dutch+Catholic+priests+abused+tens+thousands+inquiry/5874985/story.html
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| Wim Deetman, who heads the abuse commission, says its up to prosecutors to decide whether the alleged abusers shoube face criminal charges. Photo by Robert Vos, AFP, Getty Images, Agence France-Presse |
An independent Dutch inquiry into child sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests said Friday it found "tens of thousands" of victims since 1945, identifying 800 alleged perpetrators.
Dutch bishops said they were filled with "shame and sorrow" over the Deetman Commission's findings - the latest allegations of abuse which have rocked the Catholic Church in several countries in recent years.
Tens of thousands of minors were exposed to "mild, severe or very severe sexual behaviour" by clergy or lay workers in the Dutch Catholic Church over a 65-year period between 1945 and 2010, the commission said in its final report.
"Based on 1,795 reports, the commission could find the names of 800 abusers who work or have worked for" Roman Catholic bishops in The Netherlands, the report said.
Most were priests, but the figure also includes lay workers. "Of these 800 people, at least 105 are still alive."
"It's an absolutely enormous figure," said former education minister Wim Deetman who chaired the sixperson commission including a former judge, university professors and a psychologist that began its inquiry last year. He said it was up to prosecutors to decide whether the surviving alleged abusers should face criminal charges.
Claims of alleged sexual abuse examined by the inquiry went from "light physical contact to penetration," he said.
Dutch bishops expressed their regrets and offered "sincere apologies" to the victims. "This episode fills us with shame and sorrow," the bishops conference said in a statement, adding that they were "shocked by the sexual abuse of minors and the practices detailed in this report."
Based on an examination of Church archives, Deetman said that the problem of sexual abuse had been "on the agenda of episcopal meetings" since the 1940s.
"The Dutch Catholic Church knew what was happening and tried to resolve the problem," but the appropriate actions were never taken, Deetman told a press conference in The Hague.
A taboo on discussing sexuality in society until the 1960s and the Catholic Church's "closed" administrative structure were in part responsible for religious authorities' passive response to the problem, the commission said.
"Then again, people simply could not believe that a religious person could do that," said Deetman.
The former minister said the inquiry came to no conclusion about a direct link between priestly celibacy and sexual abuse, but the commission's report said celibacy posed a risk and led to a "need for sexuality."
Deetman said the risk of sexual abuse was "twice as high" for minors attending boarding schools than for others, but he stressed that the problem also existed in non-Catholic boarding schools.
The Dutch bishops conference said that "many more steps have to follow" in the wake of the report, including "clear codes of conduct and prevention programs" in the training of priests.
The Catholic Church has been rocked by revelations of widespread sexual abuse of minors in several countries in recent years, including the United States, Germany, Ireland, Belgium and Austria.
In 2004, a criminal inquiry established there were 4,400 pedophile priests in the United States between 1950 and 2002, putting the number of their child victims at 11,000.
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